Wednesday, February 13, 2008

I love Wednesday

Even though we're just as far in the week as we are out, I love Wednesday. On Wednesdays I have my elective course which is Complementary and Alternative Medicine, or CAM. It sounds touchy feely, and it is, but I love it. It's nice to think outside the box sometimes, and it makes me feel like I just took a trip to Whole Foods, even when I haven't. It relaxes me, and we even have the class with Pharmacy students so we get to see life outside the med school bubble, if only for an hour. A lot of the time I learn really interesting and useful things since so many people are using things like herbal supplements these days. Kind of makes my day.


I also have my preceptor this afternoon. Not to gross everyone out, but knowing that I am capable of doing a gynecological exam all on my own gives me hope that I can and will be a physician. It's the one time of my week when I feel competant again. Dr. B is great too, and he always makes me feel smart and on top of stuff. Almost makes me want to be an OB/GYN, but not really.


On another awesome note, I have won the mini-thesis lottery. We all are required to do a "mentored scholarly activity." It's pretty much a mini-thesis. This never really bothered me, because I figured research would look good on a resume. But, as the year has gone on, I have gotten a little less gung-ho about padding the resume, and much more interested in finding something that I can enjoy. The nature of med school seems to be...just wait, it gets better. But frankly, I am not going to waste all my twenty's waiting for something to get better when I can make it better right now. So I decided, forget about research, I don't want to spend 50 hours a week over the summer in a lab working on a project that may or may not get me published, and may or may not help me get my residency of choice (for anesthesia, it turns out not to really matter). After I realized that, I turned to the humanities. I haven't had much of a chance to do a lot of humanities since I went to an engineering school, and when I looked into my options for a project in the area, I ran across a woman who has done a presentation at our school on how women physicians are portrayed in film. I did some searching through the medical literature and it turns out that there are papers actually published about this. One thing I didn't find, though, were papers published about the portrayal of women physicians on television. Pretty big medium to not be explored. So I wrote to the program director for medical humanities and low and behold, I have the go ahead to watch all the doctor television I can get my hands on and write a paper about how women physicians are portrayed. No one has ever had a better excuse to steal the remote and watch Grey's. It's gonna be a great summer.

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